


The Metal Chair

by aurilly



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fish out of Water, M/M, Realm Hopping, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 20:09:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18763336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Rilian doesn't get to go to Bism, but he does go somewhere even farther away, where he finds someone in a surprisingly similar situation to his own.





	The Metal Chair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).



His rescuers had dissuaded him from jumping down into Bism, but Rilian’s curiosity was not so easily suppressed. He pointed to a glowing crack in the hewn stone wall out of which the city had been carved. A crack through which none of the Earthmen seemed interested in passing. In contrast to the hot winds of the deep chasm, a cool breeze trickled through it and tickled his face.

“Do you know where that leads?” he asked Golg.

“No,” the Earthman said, with a shiver. “That is a door only the witch used. I am glad she never forced any of us to go through it. Anything that blows a draught so frigid must be uninhabitable.”

Jill laughed, and Rilian knew it was because a breeze this refreshing could hardly be called ‘frigid’.

“What say you, friends?” Rilian asked. “You have talked me out of tasting the sweet jewels of Bism, but this would be a quick trip. A horizontal peek, a momentary adventure, before we continue on our way.” After his speech was met with nothing but silence and worried glances, he continued, “I will go regardless. I solicit your company in this adventure, not your permission.”

“Just as stubborn as Caspian was,” he heard Eustace whisper to Puddleglum.

Jill took Eustace’s and Puddleglum’s hands, one in each of her small ones. “Let’s just go,” she said. “The sooner we do, the sooner he’ll be satisfied.”

“I doubt it leads anywhere,” Eustace said. “Probably just a bit of shiny rock making that light.”

“There are likely dragons in there, fooling us with cool air in order to lure us to their lair, where they will fry us like so many kippers,” Puddleglum said.

Rilian ignored their grumblings and strode forward into the crack. It was wider than it looked from the outside, and rather blinding once you were actually in it. The change in not only temperature, but surroundings, could not have been starker. Before his eyes had reoriented, Rilian felt himself ramming bodily into a translucent wall. Through it, he could make out a room with oddly glowing yellow lights and a looming mass of indeterminate shape that sent waves of unexplained horror up and down his body. Ghostly figures moved about the mass. 

“Someone has barred this entrance from the other side,” Rilian whispered. “Help me, friends.”

“It was likely barred for a reason, sire,” Puddleglum said, but in the end, it was he who found a kind of transparent latch, which obviated any need for smashing. 

The entire passage reeked of the most disgusting magic, but Rilian pressed on regardless. After ten years of witlessness, he was not about to let a bit of fear or discomfort stop him from exerting his will. 

They crawled silently into the room and crouched behind something made of metal—bigger than a sofa, but not at all comfortable. It, like everything else in this room, was covered in all sorts of shiny bobs and buttons. The ghosts turned out to be men in white coats. Priests of some sort, Rilian guessed. They were too intent in their mysterious, pagan rites to look behind the non-sofa.

But now that he could see it more clearly, it was the mass that made Rilian’s blood freeze. For in the room was a chair, not unlike the one he had just escaped, except in the ways it was more horrible. A man, stripped to the waist, head bound and mouth gagged, was strapped to it, shackled ten times more cruelly than Rilian had ever been. The tightness of his bonds suggested that he had much greater strength to restrain than Rilian had ever possessed.

And Rilian could believe that strength, for the man was very well formed, muscles all on extremely well-defined display. The man possessed the kind of chiseled warrior’s body that Rilian had only ever seen in idealized illustrations. Long, dank hair covered what were likely striking features, but Rilian would need a much better, closer look to confirm. Then there was the matter of the man’s left arm; Rilian had never seen anything like it, but it reminded him of an old Ardenlandian tale for children, about a knight so perfectly noble and valiant that his armour had actually become a _part_ of him. 

Rilian was still trying to make out what was going on when one of the priests pulled a lever by the wall. The prisoner erupted into excruciating screams of anguish that did not subside until the priest lowered the lever. Over and over, they performed this nightmarish ritual. It happened enough times that Rilian felt sure that, though he could not understand how it worked, the lever was able to torture the poor prisoner, from halfway across the room. 

Whatever god these priests served, it must have been a demon.

There were only six of these torturers, and they were all weaklings. Pathetic, soft little monsters relying on this metal-based sorcery to brutalize a defenseless man twice their size. Even though he had only a Marshwiggle and two children with him, Rilian felt sure that they could subdue the villains, especially since he had surprise on his side. He silently drew his sword and motioned for Puddleglum and Eustace to do the same, only to find that they already had. Even Jill held her knife in trembling hands. The fierce anger in their expressions conveyed that they shared his determination to free this poor stranger. 

Through nods and points, Rilian ordered Eustace and Jill to focus on releasing the man’s bonds while he and Puddleglum conquered the men. Everyone nodded, and then it began. 

Two of the men carried large, strangely shaped metal stick with handles, but Rilian and Puddleglum took them down from behind before they could swing them about. The rest were unarmed and, thus, easily overpowered. They were too busy staring at Puddleglum—as though he were something terrifying, as though they had never seen a Marshwiggle—to put up much of a fight. The entire thing was accomplished in only a few moments, ending with all of the men unconscious and tied with ropes that Rilian guessed—with a shudder—were kept on hand to further restrain the prisoner.

The prisoner in question sat slumped and barely conscious in the chair.

“Was she keeping another?” Jill asked after tying up the last priest. “Another knight out of his mind?”

“I know not,” Rilian said. “But whatever his story, I intend to free this man just as you all freed me.”

However, the metal bonds proved more trouble than the soldiers. Pull as they might, not even their combined might could budge them. Eventually, Eustace gave up and wandered over to where the lever lay in the wall.

“Why, it’s an ENIAC!” he exclaimed upon further examination of the wall. “Or something very much like. Only a hundred times more advanced than anything I’ve ever read about.”

“Shhh, Scrubb,” Puddleglum whispered. “We don’t know how many more men may be outside.”

“What are you on about now?” Pole asked softly. 

“What’s an ENIAC?” Rilian whispered.

“It’s a… a sort of device for making calculations very quickly. Quicker than a person ever could,” was the incredibly boring explanation. “I didn’t think they had such things in Narnia, not unless…” His gaze wandered down to the priests’ metal sticks, and up to the lights. “It would explain a lot. Pole, this is very new technology. They only made the first models during the war. _Our_ war.”

Pole looked up from her hopeless work on the man’s bonds. “You think we’ve come back? But we can’t have. Aslan said… We were supposed to rescue the prince so he could return to Narnia, not take him home with us.” 

“What are you saying, lady?” Rilian asked, thrilling. “That we may have crossed from the witch’s realm and into your own?”

“Eustace is right. This sort of thing—everything in this room—looks more like something from where we come from than where you come from.”

“We must have muffed the Sign,” Puddleglum sighed. “And Aslan has sent us here as punishment.”

“It’s not _so_ bad in our world,” Jill said, bristling. “Aslan wouldn’t consider it a punishment.”

Quite the opposite of Puddleglum, Rilian brightened at the idea; he had wanted to go to Bism, but instead found himself on an even more extraordinary adventure, one that his father had always longed for but never gotten to experience. 

But first things first: this man needed to be released. However, it was only by Eustace fiddling with something on the wall that the clasps suddenly unbuckled and the man slid helplessly out of the chair. Rilian was there to break his fall and cradle him in the softness of his clothes. A needle that had been horrifyingly lodged in the crook of his elbow slipped out.

The needle must have been keeping him asleep, because the man woke with a start, thrashing in Rilian’s arms. 

“You are safe, it is all right,” Rilian whispered gently into his ear, over and over, until he calmed.

“You don’t look like handlers,” he said, slurring his words like a drunkard.

“Why, he’s an American!” Jill marveled.

“What is that?” Rilian asked.

“Who are you?” the man asked, wide-eyed and terrified.

Puddleglum, as ever, remained clear-headed and undistracted. “It is a long story, but what matters is that we are friends, and we intend to rescue you from this horrible place.”

The man tried to scoot back, out of Rilian’s arms, when he finally focused on the Marshwiggle, but Rilian petted him and stroked his soft hair until he calmed down.

On closer look, the man’s features were indeed as noble and handsome as he’d suspected.

“Will you come with us?” Rilian asked gently.

“Where?”

Rilian did not want to confuse the man with the kinds of complicated explanations that Pole and Scrubb’s conversation had led him to think might be required, so he simplified with, “To a place where I will forbid anyone from harming you. Beyond that, does it matter?”

The man looked around the room, at the children, at the white-coated men trussed up like guinea fowl, at Rilian’s (most likely) embarrassingly ardent expression. He nodded to himself and then stood up, refusing help from anyone. He staggered to a corner of the room, where he picked up a black cylinder. He screwed it onto the end of one of the metal sticks that had gone flying during Rilian and Puddleglum’s attack. 

“Cover their eyes,” he said to Rilian, gesturing at the children. 

Even though Rilian had no idea what he was talking about, or what might be about to happen there was something so sad, so resigned, yet infinitely terrifying in the way he said it; there was no refusing him.

Rilian grabbed Eustace by the face, while Puddleglum did the same to a struggling Jill.

The man pointed his composite stick at one of the bound men’s faces and fiddled with something at the other end. A booming noise sounded—so muffled that Rilian saw rather than heard the energy being released—and the next thing Rilian knew, the priest’s face had become a mass of blood and flesh and brains on the floor. He watched in horror as the former prisoner performed the same ghastly sorcery on each and every one of the priests. 

When he was done, he looked up, registered the horror on all of his rescuers faces, and lowered his weapon. The blank-faced ruthlessness of a moment ago no longer composed his features into stillness. Something seemed to break in him, because the steeliness fell from him, like shedding a cape, leaving nothing but the slumped shoulders of shame.

He was handsomer like this, Rilian thought. Handsomer, not because panic and regret looked beautiful (they did not), but because such qualities were those of lucid humans. He was waking up.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” the man said, more intelligibly and confidently than anything else he’d said so far. “I’m sorry I had to do that. It’s better this way, though. Still, we should go. What’s the plan? How’d you get in? Can we get out the same way?”

White-faced and trembling, Jill wriggled out of Puddleglum’s grasp. Carefully avoiding looking at the gruesome floor, she said, “We’re going to a place where you cannot bring that. Put it down.”

The man looked at her, and at the stick. He set it aside as requested. 

“Come,” Rilian said, because, no matter what he had just seen, his heart entertained no doubt that rescuing this man was the right thing to do.

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Scrubb stuff something flat into his traveling bag. Some sort of sheath of paper.

They ran, from wherever they were, through the crack, to where the Earthmen were still throwing themselves into the narrowing crack. Their new friend stared around him in wonder and confusion. He slowed down as they ran, and seemed increasingly uneasy on his feet. Only when he had begun to stumble did Rilian remember the extremity of the torture he had endured only minutes before. Whatever strength of spirit had buoyed him through the first stage of escape began to sap, until finally, Rilian and Puddleglum were forced to hoist him onto one of the horses. His consciousness barely lasted to the edge of the city.

“He looks familiar, though I can't put my finger on why,” Eustace said.

“Not likely you ever met, given that he was being kept in that hole, who knows where. I wonder who he is, poor dear,” cooed Pole, who seemed to have already forgotten her earlier horror and now shared Rilian’s instincts about the man.

“And I wonder exactly how ‘poor’,” Puddleglum added grimly. “He knew how to wield that face-melting stick—”

“It’s called a gun,” Eustace interrupted. “Russian military make, by the look of—”

“What does it _matter_?” Jill snapped. “It isn’t as though anyone in this world knows what Russia is, or America, or a gun, or any of it.”

“I’ve never seen anyone kill so ruthlessly before, so mechanically,” Puddleglum said. “He’s dangerous, our prisoner. Perhaps, before rushing off into acts of valor, we should have stopped to consider whether he was strapped to that chair for a reason.”

“He was a victim in that room, just as I was. I know it, in my heart, and I will hear no arguments to the contrary,” Rilian said in the most princely tone he could muster.

Rilian spurred his horse, and snuck glances at their unconscious companion every few minutes, for as long as the lamps lasted.

After that, other concerns commanded his full attention. Once out of the caves, the fauns and centaurs swept him away from his companions, back to a life and identity he had for so long forgotten.

* * *

Less than a day later, Rilian found himself cradling another limp body. This time, it was his father’s. He’d missed ten years, during which Caspian had grown weak and withered. Caspian’s star-blooded wife and carefree son had kept him young, but the years catch up to him during his grief for their loss and turned him into an old man. 

Rilian had barely begun to register the loss when he could hear, behind him, and from the sea, the throaty rumblings of “the king is dead, long live the king.”

He wasn’t ready for this responsibility, and he wanted it even less. In his youth, he’d assumed he would have his mother with him, if not forever, then, for as long as she chose to stay before returning to the Last Sea. Today, Rilian wished he’d been a little less carefree in his youth. The years that he should have spent preparing had instead been wasted away underground, trapped in someone else’s armour and someone else’s plans for Narnia.

The cheer rumbled its way into audible clearness. Rilian hoped no one would mind that he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he buried his face in his father’s cape. The witch had not taken him above ground in weeks. His eyes had still not adjusted to all this cold winter sunshine and glare off the snow, but he suffered through the pain without a word.

He did not want anyone to know he was anything but fully recovered. Luckily, he now had another reason for the tears streaming out of his eyes.

* * *

Later, once the body had been taken from him, and the initial death rites conducted, Rilian entered the palace for the first time since he’d been taken. Its unchanging nature offended him. He had suffered greatly, and now Caspian was dead. Cair Paravel should have been rent and devastated to match. The vestibule curtain he’d once spilled wine on should not have still been folded over to hide the stain. The tripper three steps up from the bottom of the South Wing staircase should not have remained a raw edge. The velvet upholstery should not have been so smugly smooth and plush.

Rilian took a turn from the great hall and went in search of the new, of the foreign. He went in search of the children. Perhaps Aslan had given them instructions for this. Or, perhaps, like the king’s and queens of old, Jill and Eustace could take this burden from him, rule in his stead, at least for long enough to allow him to grieve and to remember how to be himself.

He asked where the children were, but no one could tell him. They had last been seen on a tower in the East Wing, watching the ship come in, the servants said. But that was hours ago. Rilian went in search, but instead of the children, he found only the stranger, crouched in the corner of an empty hallway. He held his head in his hands, and threaded silver fingers through long brown locks. He’d surrounded himself with knives and ropes and ceremonial swords pulled off of walls.

He looked in the middle of the kind of breakdown in which Rilian would have given much to indulge.

“It cheers my heart to see you awake,” he said carefully, not wanting to startle the man, who looked up with an uncomprehending stare, before nodding with recognition. “My name is Rilian. I do not remember if I introduced myself properly last night.” When silence continued, he asked, “Where are Jill and Eustace?”

“Who?”

“The children. Our saviors. The questers from the world of heroes.”

“You mean those two English kids? They disappeared.”

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared?” Rilian asked. His father’s stories and Narnian history had taught him enough to suddenly entertain a dreadful idea, one that he did not want to be true.

With a strange, alternating rhythm of blandness, irritation, confusion, and wonderment, the man got his story out. “I mean they disappeared right in front of me. I woke up, and asked where you or the green guy or the two kids were. The… beaver…” The man shook his head and rolled his eyes as he tripped over the word. “…told me to head to the terrace. The kids were there with… with everyone else. We talked for a couple of minutes, until the ship came in and everybody got quiet. They started muttering about how they wished they could go home. Next thing I knew, they were gone, like someone had been listening and made it happen. They didn’t go downstairs, they didn’t walk by me. They were just… here one second, gone the next. I came in here and haven’t seen anyone since.”

Ah, so it had been exactly as Rilian had feared; Aslan had taken Pole and Scrubb home without giving them a chance to say goodbye. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

The man laughed, a little hysterically. “Who was I supposed to tell? The goat guys? Or maybe the walking tree girls? Or those things throwing themselves into a fire pit last night? No, wait, it was the talking mice with swords I was supposed to talk to, wasn’t it? Sorry, but when _everything_ is a fucking hallucination, a couple of kids vanishing doesn’t seem like a big deal. You’re the first normal thing I’ve seen since the chair, and even then..." He looked at Rilian's clothes and sword with a raised eyebrow. "I won’t blame you if you go poof, too.”

For the first time in hours, Rilian spared a thought for someone and something other than his own grief and sense of not-belonging. King though he now was, he knelt before the man and placed a hand on his knee, grounding himself as much as the man. Rilian remembered his father telling him that no one in the world of men knew of Narnia, outside the few who had visited and left their mark on its history. Therefore, if they really had momentarily crossed into that world, then it stood to reason that this poor fellow felt overwhelmed.

“I should have been for you there last night, and this morning. It was my idea to release you and take you to safety, but I failed you before the job was done. I should have seen the thing through and waited until you woke, explained it all to you. I apologize that I was not here, that I did not…”

“What are you apologizing for? You got me out of there. I’m the one who owes you. I’m fine.”

Rilian tentatively moved his hand from the man’s knee to his knuckles. “The hands of a man who is fine do not tremble.”

The man’s fingers spasmed, but he did not draw them away from Rilian’s touch. “They strapped me to a chair and tortured me until I didn’t know who I was. They made me do things… things I never would have done. They… You wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand better than anyone else, in any realm, ever could. Until an hour before I met you, I was in a similar state. An almost identical one, in fact.”

“Bullshit.”

“I know not the expression, but I can ascertain the meaning. I assure you it is true. Chair and all. The witch had us both.”

“Witch? It was Hydra who had me. Doctors. Zola. There’s no such thing as witches.”

Patiently, for he knew the man had not the education he had received, Rilian explained, “There are witches here. It was a witch who had me. Who took my name, my wits, my mother, ten years of my life. More years of all the poor Earthmen’s lives—the Earthmen are the people you saw jumping into the pit last night. Perhaps she was working with the men who had you. These doctors. Perhaps that was why the door was placed there. To allow her to travel between.”

Rilian had thought himself quite clever for piecing all that together, but all the response his cleverness got was a shrug. “Sure. So, this witch, where is she now?”

“I killed her with my own hand. Or, rather, I killed the snake she turned into.”

“Right. Of course. Don’t know why I expected anything else.” The man laughed again, and Rilian would have given a year of his life to hear what a real laugh might sound like, one with real mirth in it.

“Let us start again,” Rilian said. “I have told you my name, but what is yours?” 

“Before the ship pulled in, the kids told me it’s Bucky Barnes.”

“You needed them to tell you who you are?”

“I don’t remember much from before the chair. Just... snow and a train and... Steve...” He looked wary, confused, and his hair flopped over his eyes again. 

“How did Jill and Eustace know your name when you do not?”

Through the curtain of hair and even despite the sheepish downward glance, the man—Bucky—might have blushed. He certainly fidgeted in a way that he had never done prior. “The boy said there was a kid in his school who was obsessed with the war, with Captain America.”

“Who?”

“Steve,” the man—Bucky—said, as though that explained everything, anything. “Anyway, this kid’s room was covered in pictures of us, he said. They—we, I guess—were famous soldiers during the war. I looked just like Bucky Barnes, he said, who everyone thought was dead. And he got my files from the facility. Everything seems to line up. That’s who I am. Look.” Bucky opened the sheath of paper that Eustace had taken, and flipped to a page with a picture. 

Rilian had never seen a portrait with such verisimilitude. His heart ached for the contrast between it and the man before him—that wide, open, happy smile versus the heartbreaking somberness of Bucky today.

“That does appear to be you.”

“And it sounds right,” Bucky said. “Feels right. I can sort of start to remember, now that I know what to focus on.”

It had not occurred to Rilian that Bucky’s means of control had been so different from his. For all that he was still suffering, in a thousand small ways, he had not had any trouble recollecting his past once the witch was dead. 

“That was your dad out there, right?” Bucky asked after a quiet pause. “I’m sorry this is what you had to come back to.”

“Thank you. I am sorry, too.”

“Anything I can do to help?” Bucky asked. 

“You can get better,” Rilian said. “Stay with me as long as you need to until you are whole again.”

“I can’t. I have to keep moving.”

“You can barely sit up straight.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’ll come after me. I need to be ready.”

“They cannot hope to follow you. The way we took is shut. Anyone coming through that door will drown, if even the door still remains. It never has for previous visitors. You are safe from them here. I swear it.” Rilian usually did not swear on things he had no personal control over, but he felt his words to be true, in his core.

Bucky seemed comforted by his seriousness. “I don’t even know where here is.”

Rilian sat cross-legged beside his new friend, in the formal position he had spent an entire summer in Calormen practicing. The position felt stiff and unnatural after many years of disuse, but Rilian relished the opportunity to try again, to distract himself in stories that had nothing to do with him. 

“Then let me tell you,” he said. “Before I was taken, I trained in the art of storytelling, almost as assiduously as I trained in swordplay and jousting.”

Bucky stared at him, and then, for the first time during this interview, relaxed his right shoulder (the other one, the armoured one, never lost its perfectly tensed roundness) and burst out laughing. Real, amused, joyous, laughter, the laughter of a good sport and man of pleasant sarcasm.

“Right. Okay. Go ahead. This should be good.”

Rilian smiled in return. He thought this had the potential to be very good, as well.


End file.
